The Guardian – Paper outlines different legal theories that could help governments pursue accountability for harms: “Companies have spent decades obstructing efforts to take on the plastics crisis and may have breached a host of US laws, a new report argues. The research from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) details the widespread burdens that plastic pollution places on US cities and states, and argues that plastic producers may be breaking public-nuisance, product-liability and consumer-protection laws. It comes as cities such as Baltimore have begun to file claims against plastic manufacturers, but the authors write that existing cases “are likely only the beginning, as more states and municipalities grapple with the challenges of accumulating plastic waste and microplastics contamination.” Taxpayers foot the bill to clean plastic pollution from streets and waterways, and research shows people could ingest the equivalent of one credit card’s worth of plastic per week. “We’re in the midst of a population-scale human experiment on the impacts of multigenerational toxic exposures,” said Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL and a report co-author. “Plastics are at the epicenter of that.” Drawing on newly revealed internal documents and previous investigations, the authors write that producers knew of these risks and produced and marketed plastics anyway. Petrochemical producers such as ExxonMobil Chemical and Shell Polymers, and disposable plastic goods producers like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Unilever, should be held responsible, they say. Global plastics production exploded shortly after the second world war, when “an industry that had been producing plastics primarily for military purposes needed new markets”, said Muffett. From 1950 to 2000, global plastic production soared from 2m tons to 234m tons annually. And over the next 20 years, production more than doubled to 460m tons in 2019, the authors write, citing data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But plastics producers knew in the 1950s that their products don’t break down and in 1969, documents show, industry interests discussed plastics accumulating in the environment but kept marketing them…”